Digital marketing is a really exciting place to be a marketer. Almost every week there are new tools which are being introduced, or new ways of optimising your current digital marketing tools.

In all of this new technology, it is easy to get carried away. It is still important to remember the basics of your digital marketing, and as email marketing is one of the most popular (and cheapest!) ways of communicating with your customers, here are some tips which will make sure that your email campaigns have a firm foundation to build on.

Get it delivered – This is the most basic of email optimisation, but there are millions of emails every day which are not received from businesses. One of the reasons why people spend less time on this measure is that there are a number of reason why this number could be high. Is there an issue with your database? Is your email size too big? Is there an issue with the wording that you use (does it contain spam triggers)? And if your email has been delivered, is it appearing in the ‘Primary’ section of Gmail or in the ‘Promotions’ section – there are 425m Google users so this is well worth considering.

Get it opened – This is where email marketing becomes an art form by wording the subject line well. There are some tricks that people use to try to drive up opens (e.g. starting with ‘FW’ or ‘RE’ so that it looks like an email that you have already interacted with: this screams out spam), but there is no substitute for a subject line which entices the recipient and gives them a reason to open the email.

Get it read – You need to put yourself in the shows of the recipient here. If there is a huge image at the start of your email, or if your email is just one big image, then what happens if the user has a ‘do not display images’ default setting? They will not see your amazing email! At the other end of the scale, if your email contains lots and lots of words, then how likely is the recipient to read the whole thing – not very! A good balance of images and text is your best bet.

Get it actioned – Every email should have a call to action. If not, you need to ask not only why you are sending it, but also how will you measure the success of your email? It is possible here that you will move the recipient from online to offline, and as long as that is traceable (i.e. it is a designated phone number only used in that email) you will be able to measure success – just make sure that there is someone at the phone when your emails are likely to be read. And if the call to action is online, make sure that it is mobile-friendly, which is much easier with responsive websites.

Get it measured – Email marketing is fantastic for measurement – almost every step of the process can be measured within most free email marketing providers. So, you should track your results, or even consider sending two versions of an email to a segmented audience and compare the results – if you change the subject line, does your open rate go up? You should be continually monitoring this to consistently improve your email marketing.